Friday, January 21, 2011

A Day Trip With Friends

This day trip is making it onto the blog a little late... but better late than never, right?

While Nancy and Sandey were here, we took a day trip with our Espwa Children up the coast to Aux Coteaux. The trip was to celebrate a job well done for our children that participated in the Espwa Nan Nwel Christmas Show. It was such a great day, and something that we are not able to do very often with the children. My favorite part about this trip (being that I am a teacher, so by default a natural learner) is that we didn't take the children on a field trip to the beach to play and sunbathe, we took them on a field trip to educate them.

Aux Coteaux is up the western coast, about an hour and a half away from Les Cayes. The city is relatively small, but one of the larger in that area. There is a monument there called the "500 mach"- the Five Hundred Steps. This monument is literally 500 steps built into the side of the mountain that leads up to a statue of Mary and Jesus on the cross. Along the way are signs with religious "food for thought".

Once we finally reached the top... Nancy and I were a little slower than Sandey and the boys... the view was unbelievably beautiful and peaceful.

I am also happy to announce that though they are not pictured, all of our Children and Chaperones made it to the top as well. Some of the little ones even ran up barefoot! (When I asked them why barefoot they said it was because they didn't have the shoes to hold them back... whatever.)

To celebrate making it to the top of 500 steps, we had a huge soccer match/cook out at a local school yard- complete with DJ Tigre (our driver). Some of the older guys decided to take on the "locals"... and of course won!

Overall, and I don't think Nancy and Sandey will argue, it was a really, really great day.